Bucking years of hype, Stanford University announced Thursday it no longer will publicize its admissions rate — a first step at de-emphasizing an overwhelming and often demoralizing competition that has overtaken the college admissions process.

Colleges promoting their high-demand, low-acceptance rates as a way to increase prestige and lure more students “is not a race we are interested in being a part of, and it is not something that empowers students in finding a college that is the best match for their interests, which is what the focus of the entire process should be,” Stanford Provost Persis Drell said in a statement Thursday.

Whether other colleges will follow suit is unclear. But the announcement comes from a university whose admittance rate is about 4 percent, down from about 20 percent in the 1980s. The rate is so low that New York Times columnist Frank Bruni once wrote in an April Fools’ Day column that Stanford was so exclusive, the rate “plummeted all the way to its inevitable conclusion of 0 percent. With no one admitted to the class of 2020, Stanford is assured that no other school can match its desirability in the near future.”

As Bruni said later, many readers believed it.

Stanford’s announcement — the real one on Thursday — was met with mixed reviews.

”I’m happy to hear they’ve decided not to play the game,” said Margaret Rothe, a Silicon Valley college counselor. The idea that “we admit lower numbers of applicants, therefore we are superior, has nothing to do with anything, especially Stanford. It does make a huge statement for Stanford to say that that’s not what we’re about.”

But Patrick DeMichele, a Stanford junior math major, thinks the new policy might actually backfire and only increase the university’s mystique, giving the impression that the admittance rate is so low at Stanford, it won’t even report it.

“It’s adding to the allure in some way,” DeMichele said. It “can play to the same people that really liked that low number in the first place.”

The new policy also comes at a time when high school students and parents are increasingly distressed and depressed about their odds of getting into prestigious colleges, especially those listed on national rankings (another bane of college counselors.) The drive to boast about low admittance rates also has led some colleges to simplify their applications process in order to increase their number of applicants, which then makes their admittance rates lower. Students are often applying to at least six or eight colleges, another practice that also deflates acceptance rates.

College counselor Irena Smith, who guides many Palo Alto high schoolers, says that while the Stanford announcement is a good first step, she’s skeptical that it will have much impact.

“I don’t think it will make much of a difference,” Smith said Thursday, “but I appreciate they are trying to take the emphasis off the competitive process.”

Not only are there years of Stanford admissions data about acceptance rates still available online, she said, but students, especially in the high-achieving Bay Area, have been groomed for years to strive for only the most competitive schools. The University of California also has been under pressure to open up more space for the state’s students; UCLA accepted 12 percent of in-state applicants to this year’s freshman class; Berkeley accepted 17 percent.

“We live in an area where people want prestige and name recognition and it makes it very hard to get past that,“ Smith said. “The impact is what you would think, which is what happens when you spend your whole life working extremely hard to achieve a goal and do all the right things and not be able to get into the school you have your heart set on.”

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The announcement of college applications and admissions numbers has become an annual rite of spring, when numbers are released, headlines are written and parents and students can either brag about their admittance or curse their misfortune.

While Stanford’s admissions numbers no longer will be announced, they will continue to be submitted to the federal government as part of its annual public report.

Many high schools have taken to assigning Bruni’s book, “Where You Go is Not Who You’ll Be,” as required reading in an effort to widen the net for potential college choices and to release the stranglehold of ranked colleges on highly-pressured teenagers.

Smith also recommends “Educated, A Memoir by Tara Westover,” about the difference between wanting an education and wanting an institution.

“If you want an institution and it has a 4 percent admittance rate, it’s a very narrow needle to thread,” Smith said. If a student is open to other schools, “it’s becomes much less stressful.”

Rothe, the college counselor based in Belmont, says parents — especially in Silicon Valley — turn up their noses at schools that have higher acceptance rates, as if those schools aren’t worthy of their children. That, then, stresses the teenagers, who are doubtful they will get in anywhere that will please their parents.

“They’re under so much pressure,” Rothe said. “They all tell me I’m not going to get in. It’s this cloud or filter they look at every option with.”

Julia Prodis Sulek has been a general assignment reporter for the Bay Area News Group, based in San Jose, her hometown, since the late 1990s. She has covered everything from plane crashes to presidential campaigns, murder trials to immigration debates. Her specialty is narrative storytelling.